HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Vice President Al Gore, growing more emotional in the final days of the presidential campaign, unleashed one of his harshest attacks on Texas Gov. George Bush on Saturday, saying the Republican prefers a cruel social system.

For the second day in a row, the Democratic nominee ripped into Bush's recent comment that Social Security is not a federal program, saying it was not merely a gaffe but reflected Bush's real feelings.

"It wasn't a slip of the tongue," Gore said at an airport rally in West Virginia. "It was an expression of ingrained hostility to our ability as Americans to work together to better ourselves through the instruments of self-government."

Gore decried "a preference on the other side for a dog-eat-dog, every-person-to-himself mentality that works fine for the very wealthy but does not work very well always for those who are struggling to get by."

Gore's adherence to his stump speech is usually unwavering. But with so little time left in what has been an exhaustive campaign, Gore's emotions broke through.

At a prayer breakfast in Memphis before the West Virginia rally, Gore expressed frustration with the superficiality of the campaign and the interest in his demeanor and even apparel, suggesting that his chances have been unfairly hurt as a result.

"You know my heart," Gore told his fellow Tennesseans. "You know that God sees on the inside and not on the outside."

The vice president upset the Bush campaign with some of his words at the prayer breakfast. "I am taught that deep within us we have the capacity for good and for evil," he said. "I am taught that good overcomes evil if we choose that outcome. ... I feel it coming. I feel a message here that on Tuesday we will prevail in Tennessee, and Memphis will lead the way."

Karen Hughes, Bush's spokeswoman, called the remark "beyond the bounds of reasonable political discourse."

"We don't think the vice president is evil, we just think he's wrong," Hughes said.

Gore spokesman Chris Lehane said Gore was elaborating on a point he makes in his stump speech "that every person has the capacity within themselves to reach out to higher principles and the higher good."

The prayer breakfast audience included African-American clergy, notably Martin Luther King III. The event's goal was to mobilize African-American turnout.

Gore seemed to give voice to pent-up frustration that despite his experience and detailed policies, he is in a dogfight with an opponent whose major selling point, as far as the Gore campaign is concerned, is his geniality.

The vice president's exasperation recalled Republican candidate Bob Dole in 1996, who appeared baffled that Americans were not more upset about President Clinton's moral lapses. Dole famously asked, "Where's the outrage?" and Gore seems to be asking, "Where's the judgment?"

Using an odd oratorical device, Gore peppered his sentences at the prayer breakfast with sighs, as though seeking to endow them with a more positive meaning than they had in the first presidential debate, when Gore's frequent sighing attracted much criticism for seeming arrogant and insincere.

"You might even forgive me if I sometimes get a little [sigh] impatient with the pace of justice, because you know me," Gore said. "You know that even in the Valley of the Dry Bones, the Lord [sigh] breathed life into those bones."

Speaking later Saturday to a predominantly black congregation at a Pittsburgh church, Gore put in dire terms the implications of the election for Supreme Court appointments, saying:

"When my opponent, Gov. Bush, says he'll appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, I often think of the strictly constructed meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written--how some people [slaves] were considered three-fifths of a human being."

The vice president, who had said black and white communities too often meet separately, invited members of the congregation to accompany him to his next stop, a meeting of predominantly white union members across town.

If the former divinity school student sounded like a preacher at times Saturday, his words in West Virginia were those of a populist firebrand.

"There are things we cannot do solely on our own," Gore said in Huntington. "We are part of something larger than ourselves. We are part of something much larger than we can imagine. As Americans, we are bound together by a set of ideas that inspire the entire world."

Gore did not mention revelations that Bush was arrested in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol, but the crowd was keenly aware of it. Whenever Gore listed one of Bush's positions, audience members shouted out "He's drunk!" or "What's he been drinking?"

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who introduced Gore, on Friday became the second-longest-serving senator in U.S. history after Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), and the popular politician showed how he has survived so long.

Byrd had not campaigned with Gore before, but Gore recently promised him he would fight for clean-coal funding, a major cause in West Virginia. So on Saturday, the white-haired octogenarian stood beside Gore and declared, "I am for Al Gore 100 percent."

Byrd spun out some of his famous oratory as he noted that tiny West Virginia, with its five electoral votes, has become an important state in this hard-fought election.

"We're being wooed like the only daughter of a dying billionaire," Byrd said.

"But when the election is over next Tuesday, when the cannons cease, how many of these politicians will be back? Al Gore. He will not forget."

On Sunday, Gore will campaign in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa.

On Monday he will visit Missouri and Arkansas before heading to Florida.

There he will stump through the night, arriving in Tennessee at daybreak on Election Day.